I am a writer, independent researcher and consultant, probably best known for my blog, ribbonfarm.com. I am the author of a book on decision-making, "Tempo." My consulting schtick is mostly short-term troubleshooting around marketing, technology strategy and organizational problems. Preferably somewhat weird.
Before going solo, I spent nearly a decade on the traditional startup/PhD/academic research/corporate R&D path.

The End of Pax Papyra and the Fall of Big Paper

Perhaps it is because I know too much about paper for my own good, thanks to a decade of involvement in various kinds of publishing and a four-year stint at Xerox, but the more I explore the emerging world of Big Data, the more I keep going back to the history of paper as a frame of reference.

We don’t normally think of it that way, but we’re not just coming off paper as a technology. We’re coming off paper as an information culture. Big Paper. Paper as a universal foundation for anything to do with information. An empire comparable to Rome that created a century-long Pax Papyra that is now breaking apart and being replaced by a bunch of squabbling smaller kingdoms, vying for a piece of the declining empire.

The Paperless Office is Actually Arriving

The idea of the paperless office has an interesting history. It’s been a holy grail for so many decades that we’ve started to treat it like Godot in Samuel Beckett’s famous play. It has always seemed just around the corner. In 1970, fear of the paperless office caused my former employer, Xerox, to create PARC. That led to the personal computing revolution. But among the many things that came out of PARC, and one of the pieces that Xerox did successfully take to market, the laser printer, kicked the paperless office tin-can down the street for a decade.

Then came the nineties and the Internet, and a fresh wave of doomsday predictions for paper. And yet again, the vision eluded grasp. Paper use continued on its cheerful, relentless boom through the nineties. Reacting to the phenomenon, PARC researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper (now at Microsoft) wrote a widely publicized study of why paper is hanging on so persistently in our lives, The Myth of the Paperless Office. Their principal argument, substantiated through hundreds of hours of ethnographic observations, was that paper had such a huge variety of unsuspected “affordances” (ranging from light weight, to annotation-friendliness and foldability) that attempts to replace paper with a new technology nearly always underestimated the extent of the role played by paper in our lives.

The argument was interesting enough to attract zeitgeist-sniffer Malcolm Gladwell to the party, and he weighed in on the matter with a 2002 New Yorker article titled The Social Life of Paper.

Paper it seemed, had attained some sort of spiritual-mythical ineffability that would forever elude the grasp of rude digital technology.

Except that in the last 10 years, very quietly, paper has actually started on what promises to be a long decline.

Bottling Up The Ineffable

Turns out the stuff isn’t as ineffable as we thought. It’s just that paper isn’t so much a single technology as a foundation for all of modern economic and cultural life. It is simply taking time to swap the stuff out. In the process, we are realizing that there isn’t just one replacement for paper. There are many. The Kindle and other e-ink readers for books, tablets for general reading and tablets with styluses for sketching, handwritten note-taking and doodling (I have fallen in love with my stylus; it has increased my use of my iPad tenfold). On the more bureaucratic end, we have APIs for structured data transfer, systems like ACH and modern electronic invoicing for finance. Even the dragon of electronic medical records seems like it will be slayed soon. Signage may be doomed once technologies like OLED wallpaper go mainstream. Smartphones and QR codes are slowly killing ticketing.

To use Sellen/Harper language, not all affordances matter in all situations, and paper is being killed in different domains by partial substitutes that replicate the key affordances for that domain, and add enough value on top that the switch is a no-brainer. Sure, you cannot scribble on paperless bank statements, but that’s not an affordance you actually want in that situation. Sure, you cannot (yet) fold a tablet into a post-card sized object and shove it into your pocket, but for quick scribbling or coupons, the smartphone isalready pocket sized.

There are a few straggling applications that are yet to be conquered (paper receipts, the bane of business book-keeping is a big one, as is the ever-elusive digital-signature world), but they will succumb within the decade as the electronic payments problem is finally solved.

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